Domenech at Ricochet: Did the Reagan Revolution Fail?

Jim is the the director of communications at The Heartland Institute. Prior to joining Heartland, he was an ink-stained newspaperman for 16 years with many stops in "old media."

Jim covered Congress and The White House during the George W. Bush administration for The Washington Times, and worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. He has appeared on the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, and many local and national talk radio shows to talk politics and policy.

In October of 1964, Ronald Reagan presented himself to the country as a politician, giving the speech he’d been giving essentially for a decade without mention of Barry Goldwater. It’s easy for many of us to recall so many lines from The Speech. But we often forget the introduction: “I am going,” Reagan said, “to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.”

The Reagan Revolution began at that moment. It took twenty years, until the reelection of 1984, for his approach to governance and the world to be proven right by history. It took twenty-five for it to be memorialized by a wall that isn’t there.

Hayward is not just smart but a genuinely brilliant fellow, which is why, for the past several months, I’ve tried to put this post on the “conservative case for higher taxes” to the side and pretend it doesn’t exist, the way I do with the Star Wars prequels. (Never happened. Couldn’t happen.) But now he’s rewritten the same argument again, and I think it needs doing.

At their core, most technocrats are motivated by a naive belief in the inherent goodness of men. They believe people, including politicians, will see reason and the greater good if it is only shown to them. They believe in the healing power of the chart and the graph and the illustrated trajectory of society. They believe that because they play fair, the other side will too. And they are oh so very wrong.

Ben continues with more brilliance … including a tip of the hat to Heartland’s work on debunking the climate change panic.

Domenech at Ricochet: Did the Reagan Revolution Fail? was last modified: November 21st, 2011 by Jim Lakely